Probes dig deep into Fukushima
disaster By Daniel Leussink
TOKYO - In Japan, half a dozen public and
private commissions have been set up to determine
the exact cause of the accident at the Fukushima
Daiichi nuclear power plant, including the first
independent investigative commission set up by
parliament in the history of the Japanese
government. This week, it held its first meeting
in Tokyo.
"We would like to work with the
people of Japan so that it is clear what there is
to learn from the accident," said commission head
Kiyoshi Kurokawa during a press briefing held in
the parliamentary museum in the Kasumigaseki
government district. "Our aim is to solidly verify
what happened in the accident."
The
commission aims to establish the direct and
indirect causes of the March 2011 meltdown - the
worst nuclear accident since
Chernobyl in the former
Soviet Union 25 years before - that displaced
100,000 people across Fukushima prefecture from
their homes and led to the radioactive
contamination of the air, soil and sea. The
disaster was triggered by an undersea earthquake
in March 2011 and subsequent tsunami that battered
the shores of Japan.
The commission will
also investigate the effectiveness of the measures
taken in response to the accident and come up with
concrete suggestions that should be adopted to
prevent future accidents at nuclear power plants
in earthquake-prone Japan.
An unstated
goal of the parliamentary commission is to set
itself apart from a government-appointed
commission that looked what went wrong in the wake
of the accident at the at the plant, including the
response from the government emergency
headquarters. This commission has already released
a 507-page interim report, published last month,
for which it interviewed more than 400 people.
The parliamentary commission will draw on
the efforts of this government-appointed
commission to avoid doubling up the work.
But it will also make its own requests for
materials from the government and the Tokyo
Electric Power Company, the plant's operator.
"There are barriers as to how much investigative
ability the commission has," said Kurokawa, a
youthful 75-year-old Professor Emeritus in
Medicine from the University of Tokyo. "But even
so, we are going to make the process extremely
meaningful."
It will also conduct its own
interviews. "There were politicians in favor of
interviewing witnesses under oath and asked if
that is possible in Japan. In the United States,
the president has to make an oath as part of that
nation's constitution. But is there such a sense
of value in Japan?" asked Kurokawa. "I do not
think that we will be able to introduce such a
system, but we will do our best with the
constraints that we have."
The interviews
may never be released to the public for reasons of
confidentiality. The nine-member commission
includes some of Japan's fiercest critics of
nuclear power.
The move comes as Japan
plans to boost civilian nuclear exports. "The
reason why Japan is taking these dangerous steps
[exports] is to gain business opportunities and
diplomatic clout with developing countries,"
explained Yuki Tanabe, an expert at the Japan
Center for a Sustainable Environment and Society,
Inter-Press Service (IPS) reported.
Last
month, bills to allow export of nuclear plants to
Vietnam and Jordan, as part of bilateral
cooperation, were approved by the foreign affairs
committee of the House of Representatives, IPS
added. (See Nuclear drive defies cloud, Asia Times Online,
January 20, 2012.)
Among the members of
the commission is Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a
seismology expert and professor emeritus from Kobe
University who resigned his position in a nuclear
safety panel under the wing of the Trade Ministry
a number of years ago. He has been credited with
coining the term Genpatsu-Shinsai, a combined
earthquake and nuclear disasters.
Science
journalist and former engineer Mitsuhiko Tanaka is
another commission member. He says he helped
conceal a manufacturing deficit at the stricken
Fukushima plant as an employee in the 1970s. He
also says the plant may have been damaged by the
magnitude 9.0 earthquake before the waves of the
tsunami knocked out its cooling system, triggering
a triple meltdown.
The commission is
supported by a staff of six from the Upper and
Lower Houses of the Diet, four people from the
National Diet Library and around 50 people from
the private sector.
The result of its
investigation will be presented to both houses of
the Diet, the Japanese parliament, by the middle
of 2012.
Preparedness Various
other commissions are at work verifying the exact
causes of the nuclear accident, reflecting a
cultural tendency in disaster-prone Japan to do
everything one can possibly do to avert natural
and man-made accidents.
This includes one
set by plant operator Tepco, one of the Science
Ministry looking into radiation monitoring and the
release of its results through a million dollar
system called SPEEDI, and an independent
commission set up by Yukio Hatoyama, a former
prime minister.
Hatoyama sent shock waves
through Japan's nuclear community last month after
calling for the nationalization of the tsunami-hit
plant in the British scientific magazine Nature.
It was the result of the work by Team B, the
commission founded by Hatoyama in response to the
accident.
Team B was set up to provide an
account of the nuclear accident that is
independent from the government, Tepco, and the
nuclear watchdog under the trade ministry, the
Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency. It has called
for establishment of a worst-case scenario for the
stricken Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
"As long as the plant is not nationalized,
the Tokyo Electric Power Company has the right to
retain secrets," said Tomoyuki Taira during an
interview with Asia Times Online from his office.
The 52-year-old first term lawmaker heads Team B
and co-authored the Nature article with Hatoyama.
"As a former engineer, the idea of 'fail
safe' is indispensable to me," he said. "With that
I mean that even in the case something goes wrong
and an accident does occur, everything must be
done in order to protect human life and the
environment."
Team B was formed out of
necessity and not as a critique of government,
says Taira. Another reason was a lack of openness
on part of Tepco. The power company delayed making
public the instruction manuals that were used in
the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant at the
time of the accident for months, first refusing
completely and then handling them over blacked
out.
"The government may limit the release
of information in case the nuclear plant was under
her jurisdiction just like Tepco does, but then
parliament could pressure the government harder to
release the information," said Taira. "In the case
of a severe accident I am opposed to the fact that
its location remains in the hands of a private
company."
Team B also plans to issue a
report on the nuclear accident this year.
A sensitive debate The debate
in what way Japan should continue relying on
nuclear energy has shifted to a higher gear after
the announcement by the government that it will
push for a 40-year life span on Japan's nuclear
plants, underlining the sensitivity of the matter
at stake.
The Asahi Shimbun, a left
leaning national daily, criticized the government
of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan of Prime
Minister Yoshihiko Noda for not reducing the
dependency on nuclear power fast enough.
"Setting a legal life span of 40 years for
nuclear power plants will not reduce Japan's
dependency on atomic energy fast enough," the
daily wrote in an editorial on January 7. "We have
called for scrapping not only of aged nuclear
reactors but also of reactors that are located in
areas that are likely to be hit by major
earthquakes and tsunamis. We have argued that
nuclear plants should also be shut down if it is
difficult to develop a realistic evacuation plan
for an emergency."
Yomiuri Shimbun took a
different tack from Asahi. The paper, Japan's most
influential, pushed for the introduction of
nuclear energy in the 1950s, when Japan's first
budget for the construction of a nuclear power
plant was assigned. Its position is against the
proposed law revision to limit the life span of
nuclear plants.
"Elsewhere in the world,
it is rare for a country, except for those
advocating the abandonment of nuclear power
generation, to stipulate by law the life span of a
nuclear power station," the paper said.
"Meanwhile, discussion is still under way within
the government as to what kind of power supply the
nation should have in the future. It seems too
abrupt for the government to come up with such a
policy now."
Lawmaker Taira said he hoped
the proposed 40-year limit on the life span of
power plants would speed up the shift to green
energy, while at the same time saying that Japan
should keep a single reactor for research
purposes. "This law revision is a very big step,"
he said.
Taira quickly added multiple
times that he is not opposed to nuclear power out
of principle, underlining the sensitivity of the
nuclear debate in Japan. "It is very easy to hold
a placard in your hand saying you are against
nuclear power," he said. "Some people have opposed
nuclear energy for political purposes."
Daniel Leussink is a Dutch
journalist in Tokyo.
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